BOOKS OF THE TIMES;A Broken Engagement As Tragic Metaphor

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: January 9, 1996

JACKSON'S DILEMMA By Iris Murdoch 249 pages. Viking. $22.95.

Jackson's Dilemma" is instantly recognizable as an Iris Murdoch production. Like so many of her 25 earlier novels, it has a sprawling ensemble cast of upper-middle-class twits, bohemians and layabouts; a highly convoluted plot filled with improbable coincidences and disasters, and a glossy veneer of mythic allusions and philosophical asides.

While these same elements came together in Ms. Murdoch's last book, "The Green Knight" (1994), to create a remarkably moving and erudite novel, they fail to cohere in this volume into anything even remotely resembling a plausible or compelling tale. Instead, we are given a creaky story of mismatched upper-class love, overlaid with pretentious allusions to Shakespeare ("Much Ado About Nothing," "All's Well That Ends Well," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest") that end up underscoring the novel's slightness.

As in most Shakespearean comedies (not to mention most screwball comedies), "Jackson's Dilemma" begins with an unhappy status quo, accelerates into chaos, and ends with a restored sense of order. Along the way there are mysterious notes, mistaken identities and the usual assortment of misunderstandings.

In this case, the story begins with the engagement of an attractive young couple, Edward and Marian. Edward is the owner of Hatting Hall, a fine old estate somewhere in the bucolic English countryside. He is wealthy, handsome and priggish, and horribly haunted by the death of his younger brother, who drowned in the ocean when they were boys. Marian is a beautiful 19-year-old dilettante who has found a beneficent patron in Edward's lonely and wealthy old neighbor, Benet.

Benet has worked hard to encourage the romance between Marian and Edward: he harbors paternal feelings toward them both and hopes to alleviate his own loneliness by orchestrating their future happiness. Assembled at Benet's house to celebrate the wedding are a motley assortment of relatives and friends: Marian's sister, Rosalind, an aspiring painter who likes to dress like a Shakespeare heroine in boyish clothes; Tuan, a timid young man whose melancholy mien has won him the title of "the Theology Student"; Owen, a flamboyant homosexual painter with a wicked tongue, and Mildred, a faintly mystical spinster who has been planning a pilgrimage to India. Presiding over everything is Benet's secretive servant, Jackson, a mysterious fellow who seems to possess strange powers.

Expectations of a festive wedding, however, are promptly dashed when a curt little note materializes at the house. The note, to Edward, reads: "Forgive me, I am very sorry, I cannot marry you. Marian."

What ensues is an enormous amount of wailing and weeping on the part of everyone concerned. Marian disappears, and the others begin to worry that she has committed suicide. Edward talks morosely of having ruined both their lives. Benet blames himself for orchestrating the doomed affair in the first place. And the others carry on in general about their own loneliness, lack of identity and childhood woes.

It is not a pretty sight. Ms. Murdoch's characters are all horribly spoiled, and they express themselves in the high-flown, melodramatic language of classical tragedy, as though a broken engagement were the end of the world. Owen feels an "unspeakable horror and a sense all around him of chaos and depredation," while Benet experiences "a dark horror which he must not, and indeed could not, thrust away." Marian worries that she has "destroyed, wantonly and forever, everything that was good and happy in her life," while Edward berates himself for bringing "ill luck and doom" to everyone around him.

To make matters worse, Ms. Murdoch insists on seasoning her story with dozens of portentous asides. There are references to "secret agonies of remorse," "witchcraft," an "awful darkness" and strange visions. Many of these sinister references attach themselves to Benet's manservant, Jackson, who is variously compared to Prospero, Caliban and Ariel in "The Tempest" and described as a snake, a guardian angel and the Fisher King in disguise.

Why has Jackson come to work for Benet in the first place? Does he possess magical powers, and are those powers benevolent or malign? What sort of relationship does he have to the charismatic manipulators found in other Murdoch novels? Have his (and Benet's) efforts to stage-manage the lives of their friends resulted in an unfortunate thwarting of fate, or have they simply greased the way for the progress of true love?

None of these questions really engages us, so pompous and self-absorbed are Ms. Murdoch's people. Besides, Ms. Murdoch does such a sloppy job of orchestrating her story that we are constantly aware that she -- not Jackson -- is the one standing behind the scenes, pulling the characters' strings and withholding information. Not only are her plot contrivances clumsy, but she also fails to summon the sort of narrative brio -- on such brilliant display in The Green Knight" -- that might override such problems.

Indeed, there is a fatigued feeling to this entire book. Ms. Murdoch's references to Heidegger and Plato, her incessant allusions to Shakespeare, her reliance on Manichaean contrasts of good and evil, light and dark, all feel perfunctory in the extreme, as though the author were merely going through the motions, or frosting her story with metaphysical curlicues in an attempt to lend it the emotional weight it lacks. All in all, one of this veteran novelist's most disappointing performances.